Service Strategy - Addressing the Barriers

When we think of barriers, we usually think of a barricade that blocks or impedes something else. In IT we're presented with many different barriers, whether they are cultural, technical, social etc.. If we want to get the business and IT onboard, these barriers need to be addressed.

The challenge for IT managers is to co-ordinate and work in partnership with the business to deliver IT services of a high quality. We need to understand the wider context of the current and potential market places that we operate or may wish to operate in.

Thankfully, there are lots of different assessment tools available and there are a variety of models and templates we can use too. It doesn't take too much to see where our customers are after we've met with them. From the number of different models, we can choose one specifically based on assessment of inputs and outputs to get some kind of indicators. It's also about taking direct input from the customer to see where the pain points are, understanding where the problems lie. Getting to know the customer and discussing their situation.

Addressing the barriers is a fundamental process that's not specific to the Service Strategy, it's related to Service Management. These 'barriers', are problems and issues that we hear about all the time. Barriers come in many different forms such as lack of training support and lack of perceived benefits. A lot of people pride themselves on their ability to be agile and be able to put out those fires, but do they really look at things and manage service value? How well are they meeting these inputs and how well are they getting the inputs from the customers?

Barriers prevent us from being able to shift that tide towards more sustainable and more of an aligned operation. When we study resources and efficiency, it's clear that so much resource is consumed by inefficiencies. There's no doubt about it that when we think about this strategic imbalance, we need to be able to shift it and start looking at some of things that Service Management can bring us. We'll then begin looking at correlations and focus on making our services highly reliable and available. These barriers can start to be broken down once we achieve these.